Worldwide coronavirus cases top 30 million

Dozens of university campuses in major cities across France are reporting COVID-19 outbreaks, according to various local media outlets.

The affected cities reportedly include Lyon, Marseille, Montpellier, Rennes and Toulouse.

In a recent interview with French newspaper Ouest-France, the country's minister of higher education, Frederique Vidal, said the clusters of cases emerging on university campuses are "mostly linked to private gatherings," such as student parties. Still, Vidal said she wants to maintain in-person classes "because it is important that teachers and students meet," particularly first-year students "who need benchmarks."

French student unions, on the other hand, have laid the blame on overcrowded lecture halls.

Since the start of the academic year, at least 81 schools across France have been closed and 2,100 classes have been cancelled due to COVID-19.

"We have seen around 1,200 new COVID cases among school pupils this week," France's minister of national education, Jean-Michel Blanquer, told reporters Wednesday. "Classes are closed as soon as there are three positive cases."

ABC News' Ibtissem Guenfoud contributed to this report.

A 2-month-old baby in Michigan has died from COVID-19.

Michigan's chief medical executive, Dr. Joneigh Khaldun, announced the infant's death during a press conference Wednesday, while discussing how children are not spared from the novel coronavirus.

"I was so saddened to hear this news," Khaldun said. "My condolences go out to their parents and family."

Nearly 800 children across the United States have been diagnosed with Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children (MIS-C), a new pediatric disease associated with COVID-19 that can cause multiple organs to fail, according to Khaldun.

"Studies show that while children are less likely to get severely ill from COVID-19, they still can and they can also pass it on to others," Khaldun said, while urging people to wear masks, wash their hands and maintain social distancing.

"COVID-19 is not something to be taken lightly," she added.

Twenty children under the age of 1 have died of COVID-19 nationwide as of Sept. 12, according to the latest data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

An internal memo from the Federal Emergency Management Agency obtained by ABC News on Wednesday night showed that the current national trend in new cases is only slightly down while the trend in new deaths is way up.

There were 261,204 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in the United States during the period of Sept. 9-15, a 0.7% decrease from the previous week. Meanwhile, 5,906 coronavirus-related deaths were recorded during that same period, a 16.6% increase compared with the seven days prior, according to the FEMA memo.

The national positivity rate for COVID-19 tests currently stands at 4.4%, a 0.1% decrease over the past week, according to the memo.

ABC News' Josh Margolin contributed to this report.

There were 36,782 new cases of COVID-19 identified in the United States on Wednesday, according to a real-time count kept by Johns Hopkins University.

Wednesday's tally is far below the country’s record set on July 16, when there were 77,255 new cases in a 24-hour-reporting period.

An additional 977 coronavirus-related fatalities were also recorded Wednesday, down from a peak of 2,666 new fatalities reported on April 17.

A total of 6,630,892 people in the United States have been diagnosed with COVID-19 since the pandemic began, and at least 196,802 of them have died, according to Johns Hopkins. The cases include people from all 50 U.S. states, Washington, D.C. and other U.S. territories as well as repatriated citizens.

By May 20, all U.S. states had begun lifting stay-at-home orders and other restrictions put in place to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus. The day-to-day increase in the country's cases then hovered around 20,000 for a couple of weeks before shooting back up and crossing 70,000 for the first time in mid-July. The daily tally of new cases has gradually come down since then.